Financial institutions have established various processes related to the exchange of documents evidencing monetary transactions. Such documents have historically been encoded with magnetic ink so that information from the documents can be read by machine. Such documents have thus become known as magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) documents. Check processing and sorting systems have also been developed in which a check or similar MICR document has its image captured and stored electronically. Such an image can be archived so that it is indexed with its accompanying data from the MICR read.
For some time, banks have been using images of checks for purposes such as statement generation and archiving. Legislation has authorized banks to completely do away with the use of paper for most other purposes, including settlement and reconciliation of accounts between banks. In the United States for example, this legislation is referred to as “The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act” or simply “Check 21” and authorizes the use of electronic records for purposes such as presentment from one bank to another as long as the images in the electronic records actually represent any original paper documents. A large financial institution must present millions of items each day to clearing financial institutions for posting. Images must also be provided to archive vendors, customers, clearinghouses, government organizations, and the like, all of which might be considered “clients” of the image processing systems of a bank. Information describing the documents and images of the documents must often be produced in numerous formats for different clients and different purposes and through different delivery mechanisms, including bulk delivery mechanisms, where a large number of images from a bank's archive are provided to a client in response to a single request.